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>6.5. Tapes</A
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>A tape drive uses a tape, similar
	
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>[1]</A
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	to cassettes used for music.  A tape is serial in nature, which
	means that in order to get to any given part of it, you first have
	to go through all the parts in between.  A disk can be accessed
	randomly, i.e., you can jump directly to any place on the disk.
	The serial access of tapes makes them slow.</P
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>On the other hand, tapes are relatively cheap to make,
	since they do not need to be fast.  They can also easily be made
	quite long, and can therefore contain a large amount of data. This
	makes tapes very suitable for things like archiving and backups,
	which do not require large speeds, but benefit from
	low costs and large storage capacities.</P
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>But completely
		different, of course.</P
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